Salto designs a concert hall in Tallinn

10.11.2017

Founded in 1941, the Kullo Youth Center is the biggest and oldest youth center in Estonia. The centre provides hobby classes for over 2200 students, including the famous Girls’ Choir Ellerhein. Until now, Kullo Youth Center was short of a proper performance stage and hall for music and theatre that would meet the needs of various classes not to mention the rest of surrounding Kristiine and Mustamäe districts. The new multifunctional auditorium that would seat 586 visitors in parter and on balconies is planned to be completed in 2019.

The Kullo building complex is on the edge of beautiful 18th century Löwenruh park landscape, which invites the architecture to bring its flowing dynamics to the extension’s interior. First, the concert hall extension building is connected to the Kullo Youth Centre by a common entrance lobby that goes through two floors. The new entrance secures better access to functionally diverse people and organic movement between two buildings, while, it also provides a lounge space with a pleasant atmosphere looking at the Löwenruh park.The extension will be functionally quite flexible. Thanks to the simple system that facilitates to move all the seats in the auditorium under the levelled stage, the hall can host very different events. While on the other hand, the second floor walls can be used for expositions of different classes at the Youth Center’s. In addition to the flexibility inside, the concrete roof can function as a kart race circuit.The new concert hall design, covered with warm heat treated round beams in variable, is strongly influenced by the park landscape. However, it has resisted from competing with the classic example of Soviet modernist architecture of Kullo Center, and instead, it is consciously in contrast with it and the surrounding urban landscape of various businesses. While most of the windows of the extension are covered with beams to ensure privacy in classrooms and offices — the entrance and café will have big inviting windows looking at the street. In addition to the changes of indoor infrastructure, the new extension also provides an easily accessible transport plan through Räägu street, and the whole complex will altogether be more comfortably accessible by the public transport stops.